The Rocks and Minerals of Minecraft | Hacker News Reader

The Rocks and Minerals of Minecraft

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270 pointscolinprince78 comments

For a while I would work as a coder during the day, and in the evening I would work in the mines, for my son.

"Dad we need more iron ore. Dad, make sure the furnaces have coal in them."

Eventually my kid worked out that you can build generators, effectively coding it in MC bricks and providing infinite resources. Probably the first time he's coded something, he just doesn't know it.

This made my evenings a bit less monotonous to start with, but then I was managing a factory instead of hacking out blocks underground.

One thing I never understood about the game was how TNT and minecarts are supposed to work, economically. It seems you need to kill creepers to get TNT? That takes time, even if you make a farm. And then when it blows up, it doesn't really blow up enough blocks to make it worth the time, surely? Same with the tracks for minecarts. How does the investment pay off? You need a huge amount of iron to make the tracks, and all it lets you do is transport stuff about as fast as riding a horse.

I think the ideal way to use TNT is place it in the center of a 3x3x3 block room, suspended on dirt or something with low blast resist. It'll expand the room to roughly 5x5x5. You can do this again to expand to 7x7x7 So basically you're getting ~250 blocks removed per 2 TNT. A mob spawner/farm can produce 100 or more gunpowder in 10 minutes. Rails are more easily found in mine shafts than crafted. Dump water instead of pickaxing them.

This is from personal experience, I'm not sure what the ideal strategies are in newer versions of the game.

I always thought the intended ideal way to use TNT is to put it under a pressure plate in your friends home.

you mean under your friends spawn point

To be fair as a video game it doesn't need to have working economics. It's OK if something is cool and doesn't make economic sense.

I rarely play Vanilla, but I thought it had some type of powered minecarts allowing primitive automation? Maybe some types of rails that get a redstone signal speed up carts or something like that?

In modded I take the same attitude as in programming: Don't Repeat Yourself. If I have to actually mine more than a few blocks of iron, I'm done. One of my favourite innovations of the past few years has been Hopping Bonsai Pots and subsequent iterations on that idea. Miniature tree (of whatever species) grows in the pot, when it reaches full size it is harvested and gets hoppered into a container below, then grows again. Awesome. But, not at all Vanilla.

Hopping Bonsai pots are hardly automation, they're a one-block fix item. Modded packs too often turn the game into Crafting Simulator, where your job is to click the right series of buttons to get the one block that does everything.

I think the best modded pack right now is the Create mod, because in it you use more flexible, more primitive automation tools like belts and shafts and gearboxes to build machines that do the work. You can have a contraption that does everything a hopping bonsai does, but instead of crafting it in JEI you have to assemble it in the world with deployers and timers and filters and so on.

Vanilla minecarts are useful for moving mobs, but not for actual mining.

Minecraft provides surprisingly many opportunities for automation. Most of them are pretty unintuitive though. A good source on how things can be automated are technical Minecraft Youtubers like ilmango.

TNT is used in farm designs, which generate blocks needing breaking, e.g. wood farms, cobble stone farms, dirt farms. There are two ways to get a lot of TNT for this: a) duping b) building a farm yielding gun powder (generic mob farm, creeper farm, witch farm) and duping or gathering sand

Hopper minecarts can collect items from below a magma block, which allows for easy killing zones in mob farms. Normal minecarts are sometimes used as gondolas for slime block bouncing lifts as the position of a player in a minecart is more accurate on servers. Minecarts can also be used to kill creatures via entity cramming. If there are more than 24 entitities within a block, creatures receive damage until the entity count drops. Once you have an iron farm, the minecarts and tracks become cheap.

I'm in the opposite situation. I setup a Minecraft server and outsourced the hard work to my kids. They are toiling away for a couple of hours most days building all kinds of elaborate structures. I just drop in to say a few words of appreciation and go mining in search of diamonds.

They do cajole me into hunting food for them sometimes though.

Really prepping them for office life and working as an individual contributor with this approach

i sense an opportunity for “My first timesheet“.

You've recreated child labor in Minecraft lol

If you're using minecarts to move yourself around in Minecraft, it's certainly a terrible investment. However, when used as a tool, they are incredibly useful and an excellent investment. Minecarts can do two things that no other setup can: transport items between inventories consistently without the player's involvement, and move entities like villagers around the map. This makes minecarts a really useful tool in the later stages of the game, when you might want to use them to distribute items across an array of furnaces to be smelted or to move villagers to a central location to make trading easier.

TNT is sometimes worth the time it takes to make. Every block in Minecraft has a blast resistance, so if you're using TNT underground, you're running into stone blocks that will shrink your blast radius. On the other hand, TNT can be used on the surface of the desert to get sand quickly and profitably. It can also be used at the lower levels of the nether to blow up a bunch of blocks in the search for netherite scrap.

You might be looking for a kind of deliberate planned game design that just isn't really there in Minecraft.

The world is destructible so why not have a block to blow it up? TNT takes gunpowder to create because why wouldn't it? Gunpowder comes from creepers because they're around and they explode.

Minecarts are for riding in, but the first thing Notch demonstrated for them was a rollercoaster. Horses weren't added until some time later. You can still craft a Minecart With Furnace even though powered rails made them obsolete.

The most amusing part about TNT is that it's called TNT, it's crafted with gunpowder, and it looks like dynamite, which in real life are three different explosives.

I never knew what those did.

I remember wondering so many times, yet it makes so much sense.

At some point you start to learn how mobs (creepers, zombies etc) spawn and their various behaviors, which you can exploit to set up farms to automatically harvest their loot. Some farms are incredibly simple, and others very complex, but the end result is roughly the same. Some can be adapted to also let you farm experience for enchanting. Admittedly it can break progression a bit when you have enough of them but generally one or two well optimized setups can produce a fair amount of resources.

They rebalanced tracks at some point, and you get IIRC 3 or 4 each time you build some now, instead of (again, IIRC) just one like you used to. Back then, tracks were really expensive. Now, between the resource cost change and salvaging them from abandoned mines, they're a cheapish way to connect places that are too close to bother with gates (or put them in the Nether between very distant gates for super fast transportation).

you can make a creeper farm to automate gunpowder, that part is easy. the hard part is that sand isn't renewable. a lot of tech servers (scicraft being the biggest) just use tnt duping to do it until mojang makes sand renewable. i think that's the only "cheating" they do and it's kinda understandable cause otherwise it's impossible to get a lot of tnt.

> the hard part is that sand isn't renewable

If you've opened The End, there's a way to use the End Portal to duplicate sand. In one of my worlds, I have that feeding into a 32 furnace super smelter with a tree farm nearby for fuel (although I could build a carpet duper for that, actually.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfeGyXJOCBw

If you dupe carpet you can use it as fuel (3 carpets per smelt item) so it's quite inefficient. Still, as an unlimited item... As long you can supply the super smelter quick enough with fuel efficiency isn't that important.

You can find a ton of minecart tracks in old mines if you look around for them.

TNT is probably intentionally a bit difficult to get as it's a performance problem. The work the game has to do to simulate the explosion grows exponentially as long as there is more TNT to consume.

I joked with my wife that I was being a parent in Minecraft. Which is sort of true... I kept building shelters, providing food, and other supplies.

Now I try to strike a balance in being helpful as I'd expect a friend to be and letting him do some of the work. Regardless it still did wonders for getting our normally quiet kid to talk. Granted the signal to noise is about 15 minutes of Minecraft talk and 5 minutes of actual what happened in the day.

A good creeper farm can provide thousands of powder very quickly. You just need to "code" it the right way to break the mob cap.

Iron is probably the easiest mineral to get. Even a small iron farm on the starting chunks, will get you hundreds of bars per hour, as it never stops working there, even if you're away. Carts are great to distribute materials around or to collect them, not to just carry them around.

Once you have a good Creeper farm you suddenly have the problem of there not being any kind of sand farm in the base game AFAIK. You can dig up a desert to get a big supply, but even that will get consumed by a constantly running TNT factory.

But there are enough deserts. With a couple efficiency 5 shovels you can fill a full inventory of shulkers in less than 10 min.

Or use TNT. Running around with TNT and a flint and steel, in a desert, is a very quick way of getting sound.

Minecarts get to be more useful when you want to travel long distances without having to touch the controls.

TNT... personally, I've never found a use for it.

> Minecarts get to be more useful when you want to travel long distances without having to touch the controls.

This and you can (and should) build roller coasters.

>This and you can (and should) build roller coasters.

Last time I really played minecraft years ago, me an my old roommate would compete to see who could make the most epic ridiculous minecart rollercoaster track.

It was pretty fun, we'd turn entire mountains into a giant roller coaster or build floating islands or have it go down to the center of a lava cave or something.

With piston bolts [0] travelling long distances got even faster. They push the minecart forward at redstone tick speeds and are server side so they're really efficient.

But there was a faster way with a machine called "ender pearl cannon" [1]. I don't know if they still work though. They're quite complex to build but allowed to travel tens of thousands blocks very precisely in less than a minute.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGcGU9ay9io [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eOIVPQYOt8

You can make overly expensive unguided bombs by using TNT minecarts. They can be very effective for saturation bombing of areas. You can effectively eliminate the risk of Pillager outposts with a few of those configured around it. When they respawn you can trigger the system and have an on-demand air-raid. There's not much the mobs can do against an aerial bombardment.

You can also create land-mines with pressure plates.

When I used to play I found it more convenient to travel long distances using nether portals.

Step 1: install Baritone

Step 2: type "#mine iron_ore"

https://github.com/cabaletta/baritone

https://youtu.be/CZkLXWo4Fg4?t=80

I always wonder why so few people know about Baritone. It can do so much: move the player, clear areas, mine ores and other blocks, construct simple surfaces such as roads or even paste complicated Schematicas layer by layer. Perhaps it takes away too much of the fun.

Step 1: /give @p iron_ore 64

If you are going to cheat, you might as well be efficient

If you want to play creative - sure. About survival - I mean, would you think using Google Maps for driving instructions is cheating? What about those cheater self-driving cars, damn them! Back in my day we used to walk uphill both ways, etc.

Besides, it's mostly for multi-player. Playing this game single-player is only the beginning.

Rails are cheap if you setup an iron golem farm.

There is a dupe mechanic with TnT that allows you to build machines that explode stuff without consuming TnT.

Hopper minecarts pickup items really quickly, and hoppers can pull stuff out of them

For tnt, there's a duplication glitch that lets them rain down

Along with the technical uses that Hesinde outlines below, minecarts see a lot of use on casual multiplayer servers because they provide a method of AFK-able transportation. Powered minecart rails in the Nether can travel about 325k (Overworld) blocks per hour, so if you want to visit some far-flung territory you can set your character in a minecart, go get a snack, and come back 10 or 20 minutes later. This is slower than many other transportation methods (for example, boats on ice can travel 144k blocks per hour, or 1.1M Overworld blocks if traveling in the Nether), but requires much less active user involvement.

Tnt is useful for it's efficiency. Gunpowder can be automatically farmed through relatively simple means, while sand (for instance) is not so easily automated. With a few well placed blocks of tnt, entire inventories full of sand can be collected in moments compared to digging it block by block.

Minecarts and their tracks are useful for automation of resource transmission- while faster modes of player transportation exist, it's difficult to transport thousands of items by hand- with a line of tracks and some simple automation, this becomes trivial.

> I never understood about the game was how TNT and minecarts are supposed to work

I haven't played for a long time but yeah it doesn't really make sense given that you have such a large inventory. If they added some extra difficulty level where the inventory is miniscule it might make more sense. Maybe they need to make mining slower and more rewarding per ore block as well.

Has to be a mod for this?

There are mods that make the game much harder, including by cutting your inventory and limits on weight, but in my experience people are drawn to increasing the horizon rather than restricting how far you can reach.

So e.g. rather than forcing you to move more slowly (e.g. realistic walking pace, limited sprint, burden by weight) let's add moon rockets so you can go further. In fact, why stop at the moon (albeit that is where the Rats went because it's made of cheese -- in some continuities, I should really go beat that part of the pack one day)? Add space stations, ferry rockets, and eventually an interstellar drive so you can visit other solar systems.

If I put an aerial with unlimited range upgrade on the outside of a Compact Machine on the moon, and then I run the network inside that Compact Machine over a wireless link to another Compact Machine on Mars, then I can use machines on the surface of Mars, wirelessly, while stood on the (notional) far side of the Moon. Unlike the real world, Minecraft doesn't know that the latency ought to be incredibly annoying when I do that :D

"There's no wrong way to enjoy yourself". But on the whole the instinct to make it harder hasn't been as popular.

With skulk sensors doing sound based communications from a distance(next Minecraft release), you should be able to see that communication latency

I've played on custom taller maps and they become more useful when exploring expansive cave systems. You walked all the way down for the resources but have too much to carry. So minecarts become useful for the very tall stairs you have to climb up and down a lot.

I think they'll become way more useful with the 64 more blocks' height underground.

If you want to take the game to the next level there are many different mods that you can add that would add another layer of complexity to the game with new challenges and problems to solve. It could be great if you feel like the vanilla game is getting a little stale or too straightforward.

>One thing I never understood about the game was how TNT and minecarts are supposed to work, economically

They're not, really. Both function as a "fun" kind of item, TNT gets more useful in player-vs-player as an item to destroy other's bases, if you're into that sorta thing.

or blast villages out of the map when playing in creative mode :)

Minecarts are usable as part of red stone computers and other automation, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3RLNCpS6YY

I thought you could use Obsidian to construct an explosion-proof farm, but my information might be out of date

For most cases that's true. Still, Wither explosions and the Ender Dragon can destroy obsidian. That's why most people kill the Wither using the Bedrock located on the Nether roof.

Still, no material is free from destruction using glitches and some technical users remove entire chunks of obsidian/bedrock to make their farms more efficient.

Things that explode in water don't do environment damage iirc

Minecarts really are useful only to transport creatures around, and to distribute stuff from and to furnaces.

Right but you can find these abandoned mines with nicely laid out track along the whole length. The game sort of suggests that you should do that too?

But basically if you don't find enough iron in a given length of cave, you can't have tracks all the way.

The iron to track conversion ratio is pretty efficient though - so I don't know how often you'll find an area devoid enough of iron to be building at a loss... That all said if you're laying a continuous path while spelunking you'll probably manage it.

You can decomission the track when it is no longer useful and build it somewhere else. As you find more iron, the distance you can go increases.

There are some mods with excavators that can also lay tracks. Those were great fun.

I went on a game hiatus in June just to see if I'd even miss them or if they were nothing but a time sink. So far there's only two games I'd really like to play, Battlefield 2042 (which hasn't released yet) and Minecraft. To my mind it is a perfect sandbox game. Solid core loop, various secondary objectives you can set, high replayability, and deep customization. There is an impressively deep level of interaction between different objects in the game, combined with the redstone logic system there's no real limit to what can be designed. It's the Lego of the digital age.

My daughters love to play Minecraft with me.

My youngest one collects Pets. To the point I had to ban them from the house as 7 wolfs and a dozen cats in the room is a bit much. She has many stables around the house for them.

I have hitting turned off to reduce drama. So same one will leash a bunch of wolves and walk in front of older sister. Causing an accidental hit and wolves then proceed to eat the sister.

The older one loves diamonds. She follows along my mining and rushes to grab them ahead everyone else. We are working on sharing.

She also loves to produce fancy houses, better then I can do.

It’s quite heart warming when I log And a new chest is there with a sign “for Dad” and it will have whatever oddball crafted items they want to leave for me; Last was a telescope.

That's wholesome.

I used to play a lot with my niece. I can't wait to have my own children to play with them. It's so full of possibilities. Not many games are this entertaining and educational at the same time. Even though it depends very much on how you play it.

To me hitting should maybe be on for kids because its a way for them to learn.

Although after being hit a few times by my nephew when he was younger, I understand turning it off. I have not had kids, but I get the impression that most kids are just prone to certain tendencies at a young age. Like, they are kids. Maybe there are a rare few that act less like kids, but I think there may be limitations on training especially for the young ones.

But anyway I was happy to find the last time that I was in with my nephew, I had no fear of being accidentally attacked with a sword.

I like how unfocused article feels. With the videos, comments and interesting facts, it manages to replicate the experience of reading an article at the same time you're randomly browsing the internet and talking about it with your friends in a group chat. I wonder if it's deliberate?

Vanilla Minecraft has a decent smattering of ores (they just added copper) - but if you want the rabbit hole you head into something like GregTech: New Horizons and the massive ore dictionary it has.

However, it's not entirely realistic as the only way to get titanium is from the Moon ...

GT:NH does hit a lot of good points, but overshoots by quite a bit. My best experience in minecraft was from making my own GT5U kitchen sink pack with GT-based modified recipes.

I think gregblock could be to your liking. Altough it is greg lite. Same with omnifactory, sadly.

Still quite enjoyable packs.

I've tried it. GTCE's dev is on a power trip and completely misses the enjoyable aspects of gregtech. It's like if someone pissed in a wine you like then insisted that it's better and anyone who thinks otherwise is out of their depth. GTCE isn't even in need of a fork because all of the work has been shoddy from the beginning. It's a failed project.

copper wow.. what can you do with it? make wires?

a spyglas (=lets you zoom in) and lightning rods (catch lightning that would have struck in a radius around it otherwise). And the blocks look nice, and slowly oxidize and turn to green copper (which you can stop at any stage by waxing the block with bees wax)

The process of going from rocks to manufactured goods is fascinating, and probably part of the interest in Minecraft.

Obligatory link to a video showing the home refinement of iron metal from minerals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBBt7IhHOFQ

The best ref on _primitive_ Iron production I've seen is acoup.blog ... also textiles, food, etc

Some Minecraft mods like TerraFirmaCraft and new games such as Vintage Story opt for a more realistic portrayal, and include the use of realistic ore and flux in smelting.

The article touches on this, but one of the things that pretty much every computer game gets wrong is making diamonds super strong and rare in the natural world, when in the real world they’re neither.

De Beers must be laughing down their sleeves.

Strike the Earth!

Like almost everything else, Dwarf Fortress's geology is in a class of its own. There are about two dozen stone types that form layers, divided quasi-realistically into sedimentary, igneous intrusive, igneous extrusive, and metamorphic [1]. Then there are forty other types of stone that occur as veins and pockets [2]… and then there are about twenty types of metal ore and 130 different types of gem!

[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Stone#Stones_f...

[2] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Stone#Other_St...

I think the 'rocks and minerals' follow Notch'es psyche, he's insane, so, it's just a game!

Geology lesson!

It's probably amazing to incorporate what we can do in Minecraft and convert it into a real-world object. Given that we will only use it for good purposes. It will drastically transform our world and imagine the countless possibility of the creative minds can do.

Since you've got a pretty new account, here's a tip: Hacker News is not Reddit. This community takes a very dim view of sarcastic dismissiveness.

You're welcome to dislike anything you want, but generally speaking, let those of us that are more playful enjoy our whimsy.

Or, to borrow a phrase that's long out of favor - don't harsh the mellow, man.

I am surprised you got any information out of gp. I have no idea what that comment is supposed to be saying.

I am not sure either but I have a feeling English is not their first language.

Regardless, most interesting comment in the thread in my opinion.

Not sure what you mean and honestly in English that doesn't come across as fully coherent. But it is a really fascinating idea.[

How would we manifest Minecraft things? You mean like a Microsoft Hololens demo or something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com